Kenneth Morley Wilson, 83, Renowned Glass Expert

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Published: April 9, 2005

Kenneth Morley Wilson, a noted historian of glass manufacture in America, who was long associated with the Corning Museum of Glass and the Henry Ford Museum, died on March 29 at his home in Punta Gorda, Fla. He was 83.

He died after a long illness, his family said.

The ultimate connoisseur, Mr. Wilson wrote scores of articles about glass in both its decorative and utilitarian forms. He wrote several of its most admired treatises, starting in 1959 with ''Glass in New England'' (Sturbridge; 2d ed., 1969); a complementary volume, ''New England Glass and Glassmaking,'' was published in 1972 by Crowell.

He joined the doyenne in his field, Helen McKearin, as co-author of another classic, ''American Bottles and Flasks and Their Ancestry'' (Crown, 1978). ''There is little doubt that this 780-page study will become the bible to American bottle buffs,'' Rita Reif wrote in The New York Times.

A meticulous researcher, Mr. Wilson compiled the two-volume catalog of the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, published as ''American Glass, 1760-1830,'' by the museum and Hudson Hills Press in 1994.

At his death he was working on a two-volume treatment of an American glassmaking tradition he had written about since 1956, when he met Robert Bryden, the last manager of the Gundersen-Pairpoint Glass Company, a successor to the historic Mt. Washington Glass Works of Boston. (A direct descendant of the Mt. Washington firm, the Pairpoint Crystal Company of Cape Cod, bills itself as ''America's Oldest Glassworks,'' founded in 1837.)

The first volume of the history, ''Mt. Washington and Pairpoint Glass,'' is ready for publication by the Antique Collectors' Club of Woodbridge, England.

Just as Ms. McKearin had turned to Mr. Wilson for help with ''American Bottles'' when she was in failing health, Mr. Wilson turned to Jane Shadel Spillman, curator of glass at the Corning Museum, to complete Volume 2 for him. Yvette Sterbenk, spokeswoman at the museum, said Ms. Spillman would now review Mr. Wilson's research and prepare the text for Volume 2.

Born in Philadelphia, Kenneth Wilson grew up in Harrisburg, Pa., and received fine arts degrees from Lehigh University and the University of Pennsylvania. He also learned the printing trade in his father's shop, apprenticed as a machinist at the Bethlehem Steel Company and served with the Army in Europe in World War II, returning with a Purple Heart.

He began his curatorial career at the Delaware State Museum in 1951. Moving to Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, Mass., he rose to chief curator by 1963. For the next 10 years he was curator, assistant director and chief curator at the Corning Museum of Glass.

From 1973 to 1985, he was director of collections and preservation at the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich. He retired two years later as senior curator of American decorative arts.

Mr. Wilson is survived by his wife of 25 years, Alice Walter Wilson; a son and daughter from an earlier marriage, Kenneth Jr. of Washington, N.J., and Patricia Hallinger of Cape Coral, Fla.; two stepdaughters, Leigh McKay of Brooklyn, and Cynthia Kay of Denver; a sister, Betty Ayella of Towson, Md.; and three grandchildren.